A displaced Californian composer writes about music made for the long while & the world around that music. ~
The avant-garde is flexibility of mind. — John Cage ~
...composition is only a very small thing, taken as a part of music as a whole, and it really shouldn't be separated from music making in general. — Douglas Leedy ~
My God, what has sound got to do with music! — Charles Ives

Monday, December 10, 2007

This is my mind imagining making money off of your mind on music

In idle moments, I've realized that if I had a tad less backbone, were a tad more evil, and were significantly more greedier than I actually am, I would probably go straight into the pop-therapy/human-potential/psych-training business with a program based on improving your life and my pocket book through immersion in environments of precisely tuned musical sounds, with the sales pitch that the right combination of intervals will sooth your psyche and cure your physical ailments, and bring the world peace and prosperity. Or something like that.

There have recently been a number of well- and even best-selling books for lay audiences on the topic of what music does to our minds (and -- the more interesting question of -- what our minds do with music), including Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neatherthals, Dan Levitin’s This is your brain on music, and Oliver Sacks' new book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. I enjoy reading Music 00001, Victor Grauer's speculative blog on the origin of music and Martin Braun's Neuroscience of Music website has also been extremely helpful with his summaries and critiques of recent research; Scott Spiegelberg's Musical Perceptions blog presumably doesn't need introduction around here. The science of musical perception, and the neuroscience in particular is a hot and rich field at the moment, with interesting insights into everything from the origin of music to the evolution and relation between the neurological organs used for speech and for music (and the related question of the use of music as a communicative and as an absolutely aesthetic system) and on to the extent and limits of our musical perception, the last a very interesting question for composers. If I read the research well enough, it seems that we are just at the beginning of figuring out what music does and can do for us.

So back to my dastardly plan: I would devise a course, dished out in small, and ever-more-expensive units of training by lab-coated trainers in small cubicles with ultra modern decor, Lazy-boy chairs, some LED-studded machinery and very comfortable headsets, in which subjects were immersed in precisely generated synthetic environments of tones, beginning with the most simple intervals in ratios of just intonation, and moving on to ever more complex ratios. * (I would orient the course towards intervals rather than precise frequencies; although some have tried (and marketed) courses in learning absolute pitch, a disposition for AP appears to have a genetic component that is not universally distributed, and aside from AP and some military research on the use of very low and very high frequencies for crowd control, the best result I've encountered for the influence of frequency is a study indicating -- I kid not -- that certain frequencies can improve or ruin the taste of Carlsberg beer. If I were an innkeeper, that'd be useful...) Simultaneously the sounds would begin with sine waves, gradually move on to more complex and even noisy wave forms. The subjects would learn to recognize and even reproduce each new interval, and eventually chords and clusters, with the objective of mastering ever-larger vocabularies of sounds with ever more accuracy. As the trainee would be able to internalize ever more complex acoustic phenomena, the phenomena of tonal dissonance would be eventually become relative rather than an absolute, with the sales point being that ability to control a dissonant and noisy sound environment is a precondition for being able to survive and thrive in an increasingly complex, indeed dissonant, world.

In other words, a glossy new package for some old-fashioned ear training.

_____*I would orient the course towards intervals rather than precise frequencies; although some have tried (and marketed) courses in learning absolute pitch, a disposition for AP appears to have a genetic component that is not universally distributed, and aside from AP and some military research on the use of very low and very high frequencies for crowd control, the best result I've encountered for the influence of frequency is a study indicating -- I kid not -- that certain frequencies can improve or ruin the taste of Carlsberg beer. If I were an barkeeper, that'd be useful, but I'm only a composer.

1 comment:

I'm smack in the middle of the Sacks book right now. It is absolutely fascinating. His subjects are real musicians with real concerns, and he addresses topics that I have always wanted to learn about. The only problem I have with it is in the chapter on musical hallucinations, every time he mentions a piece of music, it runs through my head until he mentions another one that takes its place.

It is written in a very straightforward and honest way and directed toward the curious lay-person (music-wise, that is) as well as the seasoned musician or music lover.